Roundtable Feature: Representations of Regency Royalty

The Royal Studies Podcast

In this episode, host Amy-Jane Humphries interviews Natalee Garrett, Sarah Betts and Rosalind Freeborn to discuss (fictional) representations of regency royalty.

Guest Bios:

Sarah Betts is a PhD candidate at the University of York working on a thesis exploring cultural memory and public histories of the English Civil Wars from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. She has wider interests in the history of monarchy and public history and heritage, and historical fictions, and is a section editor for early modern and modern monarchy for Royal Studies Journal. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on early modern and modern monarchy in Britain, memory of the English Civil Wars, and the portrayal of history on screen. Her most recent publications include

• Royal Biography Between the Lines: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances and the Life of Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817) RSJ 11.2 (2024)
• Latest publications - 'Roundhead Reputations Twenty Years On: Cultural Memory Studies and the English Civil Wars',English Historical Review, 138:593, (2023)
• 'By The Sword Divided: The English Civil War as Sunday-night Television Drama', British Journal of Military History, 10:3, (2024)

Natalee Garrett graduated with a PhD in Modern History from the University of St Andrews in 2022 for a thesis titled “Those Scandalous Prints: Caricatures of the Elite in France and Britain c.1740-1795”. She began teaching at the Open University in 2021. Her first monograph, a biography of Queen Charlotte, was published by Routledge in 2024. She is currently working on a second monograph which examines the public images of the four queens of Georgian Britain and which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Rosalind Freeborn started her career as a book publicist and moved into the world of music handling the publicity for the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Later she ran her own PR consultancy working with creative clients in the fields of art, design, retail and architecture. She is also an artist who exhibits and sells her work regularly. In 2022 Rosalind appeared on a Channel 4 life drawing programme demonstrating her unique collage technique using fragments of paper. She was prompted to write Prince George & Master Frederick after investigating her grandmother’s story that her family might, in some way, be connected to King George III. Her research uncovered the real-life history of Frederick Blomberg and she found his story so fascinating that she wrote this novel which is her first published work.